Forget Innovation, Who Is Your Chief Disruption Officer?

Patrick Hanlon
, ContributorI write about branding & the power ideas have to transform.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

I am sitting in the back seat of a taxicab in New York City. The traffic is Midtown, stuck bumper to bumper.

“Everything is turned upside down!” the cabbie shouts, pumping his arm up and down in the air. “Five years ago it was not like this!” he cries.

The taxi driver is not talking about Midtown Manhattan traffic. He is from Alexandria. Not the Alexandria we know on the Washington Beltway, but the Alexandria in Egypt, named after Alexander the Great.

He is talking about politics. He is talking about how his family’s life there had been turned upside down. He is talking about being hit on the blind side.

You don't see what’s coming. Sometimes that’s because you can’t see what you're seeing. Sometimes it’s just because you haven't seen it before. And because you haven't seen it (or because no one has explained to you what you have seen) you don't know what it is. Our brain, after all, only identifies what it already has seen, understood, categorized.

Moving across the continent to the Left Coast, taxi companies in San Francisco have recently suffered a disruption. Not on the geopolitical scale of Alexandria. But a displacement, nonetheless.

Taxicabs have traditionally been hard to come by in San Francisco. Taxi hubs are random and late-night riders can be left standing, eventually realizing they’ve been stood up. It was not unusual for riders waiting for a cab to call the dispatcher and find out their car had never been called in the first place. Riders missed meetings, they missed dates, they missed flights. They were frustrated.

Taxi companies threw up their hands. Oops.

But some riders didn’t get mad, they spotted a gap in the marketplace. They turned the ‘oops’ moment into an opportunity.

Along came Uber. A technological overlay on the San Francisco taxi company scene that put consumers in control. As you may know, rather than random prowling, riders and drivers find each other thanks to smartphone geolocation tracking. The competition for cab company owners was suddenly not another cab company but, as Marc Andreessen declared on CNET, “Uber is software eats taxis.”

It is evolution, it is innovation, it is disintermediation. It is disruption.

In England, a major news company is paying billions to purchase smart, brash, independent start-ups—and tasking them with deliberately competing against (with intent obliterate) their in-house competitors.

What happens to the car insurance industry when you have driverless cars?

Smart phones today can use software that ‘projects’ 3D images. So a geologist at a remote site (whether in Wyoming or Tibet) can send a core sample back to the lab at HQ for associates to study. Ultimately, similar technology could enable us to ‘send’ a ring from a jewelry shop we’ve discovered in Paris to a daughter in Palo Alto to see if she likes it. Maybe she can even try it on to see if it fits.

The words “Chief Disruption Officer” are not a title we’ve seen yet, but it might be coming our way.